DUBLIN (Reuters) – Apple may proceed to build a 850 million euro ($ 1 billion) data center in Ireland, the High Court ruled on Thursday, bringing relief for the government after a two-year planning delay which it feared could hurt its reputation with investors.

Apple in February 2015 announced plans to build the data center in a rural location in the west of Ireland to take advantage of rich green energy sources nearby.

Planning permission was granted by the local council six months later, but a series of appeals blocked Apple from beginning work.

High Court judge Paul McDermott on Thursday dismissed two separate appeals against the planning permission, clearing the way for the project to proceed.

Ireland relies on foreign multinational companies for the creation of one in every 10 jobs across the economy and sees major investments such as data centers as a means of securing their presence in the country.

A similar Apple center announced at the same time in Denmark is due to begin operations later this year and Apple has announced it will build a second data center there.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar met Apple executives last month and said they had made clear their frustration with the planning and judicial delays and warned the process would color decisions that they might make about future investments.

The government has said it is considering amending its planning laws to include data centers as strategic infrastructure, thus allowing them to get through the planning process much more quickly.

It has said it will be one of the biggest capital investment projects in the west of Ireland, providing 300 construction jobs and 150 on-site permanent jobs.

We’re only weeks away from Apple’s annual WWDC dev conference, which kicks off on June 5. While the company usually takes that opportunity to showcase new advancements in its software platforms and tools for app developers, it’s expected to additionally unveil three updated MacBook models. That’s according to sources who told Bloomberg that the Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pro will get a faster Intel 7th-gen Core (Kaby Lake) processors, while the 12-inch MacBook and the older 13-inch MacBook Air are also slated to get a speed boost by way of faster Intel CPUs. It’s worth noting that these are merely just upgrades…

An editor for The Verge took a job with Apple — but didn’t tell his employer.

Chris Ziegler, a founding editor at the tech-focused digital media publication, began working for Apple in July 2016. Ziegler did not tell The Verge, where he had been a deputy editor, and continued to be employed by the website, according to Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel, who posted a note to The Verge on Friday afternoon.

Patel said that the website had become aware of Ziegler’s dual employment and investigated whether he had been involved in any coverage of his new employer. Strangely, Patel said that the website had not heard from Ziegler in August or September. Read more…

Late this afternoon, Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, published a post detailing the circumstances around the departure of Chris Ziegler, a founding member of the site. As it turns out, according to Patel, Ziegler had been pulling double duty as an employee of both The Verge and Apple.

While people mourn the loss of the headphone jack on the iPhone 7, they ignore the real danger of Apple’s AirPods : If you wear them while you use the bathroom, you run the risk them falling from your ear into the toilet. Be careful out there, AirPod users.

According to a new report from one of the most reliable Apple analysts in the world, Ming-Chi Kuo at KGI Securities, we are about to see a dramatically overhauled MacBook Pro towards the tail end of this year.

Following his trip to China after investing $ 1 billion in ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing, Apple CEO Tim Cook is reportedly scheduled to visit India and meet the country’s prime minister Narendra Modi. While Apple is gearing up to launch its own retail spaces in India, it’s been blocked from selling refurbished devices in the country. Apple declined to comment on Cook’s travel plans – so they certainly would have a lot to talk about. In addition, Chinese hardware giant Foxconn, which is contracted to assemble iPhones, is slated to open a manufacturing facility there, but has delayed its plans over due…

ead of the iPhone SE launch – a handset that is going to appeal to a much wider base than the geekerati of Silicon Valley – Apple has pulled in another celebrity to remind us all what the iPhone can do. But this is no Kenny Chesney promoting Apple Music or Stevie Wonder showing off the VoiceOver feature. Apple has pulled out the biggest gun it could find.

Throughout the day, young scholars will be informed about myths of the tech field, inspired by a panel of women who work in technology that will share the vast career opportunities and involved in an innovation activity where they will create web pages.

The Apple App Store has long enjoyed a sterling reputation for screening out malware. But last weekend, the company pulled apps infected with XcodeGhost malware from the Chinese Apple App Store — infected apps that had apparently been created with a counterfeit version of Apple’s Xcode IDE by unsuspecting developers.

As a precaution, Apple emailed its developers on Tuesday, recommending that they validate their installed version of Xcode using a simple procedure to ensure it wasn’t a hacked version. The email also contained a reminder to “always download Xcode directly from the Mac App Store, or from the Apple Developer website, and leave Gatekeeper enabled on all your systems to protect against tampered software.”

Although the Cupertino, Calif., company did not boost the amount of free storage space — as Computerworld speculated it might — and instead continued to provide just 5GB of iCloud space gratis, it bumped up the $ 0.99 per month plan from 20GB to 50GB, lowered the price of the 200GB plan by 25 percent to $ 2.99 monthly, and halved the 1TB plan’s price to $ 9.99.

The first time I saw CarPlay in action, I couldn’t believe it . You could plug your plug your iPhone into the infotainment system and then get iOS on your dashboard?! It seemed like Apple finally found a way to turn an automobile into a rolling computer like Knight Rider.

There’s a user-friendly way to hack into people’s iPhone contacts, messages and photos, a researcher claims. Indeed, his exploit, working on the latest iOS, version 9.0.1, is now available on YouTube and is getting a lot of interest…

Apple’s developer software Xcode will soon be available to Chinese developers.

First spotted by Apple Insider, this news comes on the heels of a malware attack on apps in the App Store.

Last week, security researchers at Palo Alto Networks discovered the infected apps and publicized an analysis report detailing the malware’s spread and impact. Xcode is a set of software tools developers use to create iOS apps, but a modified version of Xcode containing the malware, dubbed XcodeGhost, made its way into the App Store.

As Palo Alto Networks explains, the standard Xcode installer is nearly 3GB, which means it could take even longer to download large files from Apple’s servers in other countries. In response to this, some Chinese developers choose to download the software from other sources or obtain copies from colleagues. It’s also hard for developers to detect malware like XcodeGhost because it’s deeply hidden. Read more…

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The iPhone 6S arrives tomorrow morning, and Reuters says the fever-pitch demand for the latest iPhone in China is spurring a boom in phony stores that look a lot like official Apple stores–right down to the bags.

Yes, it’s that time again, when the Apple faithful/crazy line up way early to buy the next version of the iPhone, this time the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.

This year, people are standing out in the elements — and sleeping there overnight — to buy a phone that looks identical to the one they already have, but with, um, an updated camera and a new kind of screen press.

Here are the lines, in cities around the world.

New York

Above: Waiting in line in NYC (Eli Blumenthal ‏@eliblumenthal)

Above: Apple fans line up at the “Church of Apple” in New York to buy an iPhone 6s.

Image Credit: Eli Blumenthal ‏@eliblumenthal

San Francisco

Above: (Justin E. Harris @envisionwithj)

Periscoper Justin Harris reported that around 16 people were already camped out at the downtown San Francisco Apple Store Thursday night. Check it out here.